


A Werewolf, A Gunslinger, and A Grudge

by whatTheFuckIsThis



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: Copious amount of cursing, Gen, Kidnapping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:47:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25796122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatTheFuckIsThis/pseuds/whatTheFuckIsThis
Summary: Doc gets kidnapped by a woman from his past. It’s up to the gang to piece together what happened and find him before it’s too late.
Kudos: 4





	A Werewolf, A Gunslinger, and A Grudge

**Author's Note:**

> The time period of this story is ambiguous but sometime after Dolls died (rip) and before Doc gets turned into a vamp.

It was an ordinary day in Purgatory, which is to say everything went batshit before breakfast. Jeremy woke up to an incoming phone call from Waverly and an ungodly number of texts messages.

He accepted the call and before he could get a word in, Waverly started yelling. “Jer, you need to get to Shorty’s ASAP. Doc’s missing and Wynonna is about ten seconds away from setting the whole town on fire.”

“It’s a great plan, Waves. Everyone would have to run out of their burning houses and then I could shoot the motherfucker that took that asshole.” Jeremy heard a shot go off and the sound of glass breaking. He wouldn’t be surprised if Wynonna had taken half of the supernatural residents of the town hostage in an attempt to find Doc.

“Waverly, what’s going on?” He said groggily into the phone. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the time on his phone. 8:17. Just a few short hours from when he’d finally fallen asleep. Last night’s searching was just as useless as all the others. The dark web message boards Black Badge agents used to use were wiped. Satellite images showed no evidence of their headquarters or safe houses. All bank accounts linked to BBD were gone. There was no trace of Black Badge or its agents anywhere he looked.

“Wynonna, stop shooting things!” Waverly shouted. “Doc’s not under the whiskey glasses!”

Jeremy heard the phone tumble down and crash into the floor of the bar. So, no more explanation from Waverly. Jeremy groaned and rolled out of bed, as quickly as someone who just woke up with too few hours of sleep could. He got dressed and packed up his gear before Waverly returned to the phone.

“Just get here quick, Jer. Oh! And bring your gun. Things might get a bit messy. See you soon!” Waverly hung up.

“I don’t have a gun…” With that, Jeremy got into his car and started the short drive from the motel to Shorty’s.

He saw Wynonna’s rampage even before he walked into the bar. The front window was broken and the door was barely hanging on. The barrel of a gun peaked out of the gap between the broken doors and he heard the click of a round entering the chamber.

“Get lost, shiteater,” Wynonna slurred in his direction.

“Put the gun down, Wynonna,” Officer Haught yelled from inside, peering out the broken window. “It’s just Jeremy.”

Wynonna poked her head out, gun still pointed at him, and sighed. “Oh. What took you so long Chetri? We’ve been here all morning.” She lowered the gun and opened the door for him, not that it could close.

“I think you mean all night,” He whispered under his breath as he entered the bar. “Holy shit, what happened in here? Was this all Wynonna?”

“Thanks for the compliment, but no, it was like this when I got here. Mostly.” Wynonna collapsed into a bar stool and downed the cup of coffee in front of her. She motioned to Waverly to pour her another as she slumped against the bar.

Nicole pointed him in the direction of a box of donuts and coffee. Once Jeremy loaded up a plate and drank half the pot, the four of them got settled around the bar.

“Alright, so here’s what we know.” Nicole said, launching into an explanation of the kidnapping.

Doc had been working the bar until it closed at 2am. He closed up for the night and then went to sleep in his apartment above the bar around 2:30. Around 5am, Wynonna showed up to the bar – they were going to go hunting before the sun came up. She found the door broken, the lock busted. She raced in and found glass bottles shattered on the floor and fresh pools of blood. Bloody handprints lined the railing of the stairs, going up or down, she couldn’t tell. When she got up to Doc’s apartment, the door was busted in just like the front but the apartment looked otherwise untouched, except for Doc’s absence and the note that replaced him.

Nicole handed Jeremy the note. It was scrawled on the back of a gas station receipt in Doc’s handwriting.

> _The wolf has finally caught up with me. I am afraid this will be the last you hear_
> 
> _from me. She is owed a debt I cannot repay. Until then…_

“So Doc was taken by a…”

“A werewolf. Yeah. A motherfucking werewolf.” Wynonna said.

“It’s about time we had one of those,” Jeremy commented.

“Can you just do your sense-y thing so we can find Doc and kill this werewolf bitch?”

Jeremy closed his eyes and tried to focus on Doc. He thought about his awesome mustache, killer sense of style, and complete lack of knowledge about the past hundred years. When that didn’t work, he closed his eyes tighter and scrunched up his face. But he felt nothing, not even a tingle. Maybe that meant Doc wasn’t actually in trouble, or maybe it meant something much worse.

“I can’t sense him.” Wynonna deflated, her eyes drifting to a still-wet pool of blood on the floor beside her chair. After all they’d been through, he wasn’t used to seeing her look so despaired. It felt wrong for Wynonna Earp to be anything other than pissed off in the face of a bad situation. “But at least Doc knows this werewolf. Waverly, maybe you can find her in your archives.”

Waverly shook her head and sighed. “I already looked. There are no mentions of werewolves, or people who were never seen at night, or people allergic to silver, or anything like that.”

“How about any real hairy women?” Wynonna asked half-joking.

“Hey! Don’t judge another woman’s body hair.” Nicole shouted. Wynonna mouthed a ‘sorry’ and rolled her eyes.

“Now that you mention it…” Waverly ran over to the table where she had laid out some of her archive. Old photos and newspaper articles of Doc’s acquaintances filled the space. She rifled through the pile for a few minutes before emerging with a small book.

“This…” Waverly said, flipping through the book and muttering to herself, “This is Doc’s old address book, of sorts. Most of it is useless details about women he, um, spent the night with. But this page might be useful.”

She moved to hand the book to Wynonna who shoved it away before she could see the page. “Oh, no, thank you. If I wanted to torture myself, I’d eat some of Jeremy’s vegan lunches.”

Jeremy took the book. “Laugh all you want but at least my cholesterol will never get to deadly levels.”

“You’re in Purgatory, Jeremy. You’re more likely to be dismembered by cannibalistic serial kilers than die from natural causes.”

Jeremy ignored her and read through the page Waverly had opened the book to.

> _18 – 05 –_ _1879_
> 
> _Met a young woman with more facial hair than any man, even the most_ _ill-kept among us_ _,_
> 
> _I have ever seen. Quite a fascinating personality and an even lovelier bed manner_
> 
> _to go along with it. I asked her to leave town with me. Purgatory is no place for such_
> 
> _a unique lady. She refused and left my_ _room_ _in a hurry. I hope_ _to_ _see her again._
> 
> _20 – 05 – 1879_
> 
> _Have not seen that woman again. Asked around and learned that her name is Harriet Pachta. No one I asked knew much about her, save for a mystical fellow who would not talk to me. My business in Purgatory will be over soon. I hope never_ _to_ _return to this wretched town._
> 
> _23 – 05 – 1879_
> 
> _Spent the day with Harriet. Between the two of us, we spent barely an hour out of bed, until_ _night_ _began to fall. Then Harriet quickly gathered her things and made to leave. I asked, begged her to stay – dangerous things come out at night in this town, some that not even I dare to face – but she refused. She left my room and I, being a gentleman, made to follow. I would feel rather awful if a lady met her doom because of my actions. I stayed in the shadows, following her from afar, for what reason I cannot recall. What I saw, I can barely believe. Once we got to the outskirts of town, she started to change. Her hair thickened, her face grew long, and her posture worsened. She howled something fierce_ _and ran_ _on all fours_ _in the direction of an old farm house. I could not follow any longer,_ _not without exposing myself_ _. I will investigate the following morning._

Jeremy flipped through the next couple pages, trying to find the next day’s entry or any indication of what happened. There was nothing. The next entry was from several months after and detailed in explicit detail an encounter with a women he was meant to turn in for a bounty.

He handed the book back to Waverly and took out his laptop. Since he’d set up in Purgatory, he started collecting detailed satellite images of the Ghost River Triangle. With any luck, he could find the site of the farm house Doc mentioned. Wynonna and Nicole started brainstorming about next steps. Waverly started pouring through documents again, trying to find any mention of a Harriet Pachta.

“I mean, I know Doc can be a massive dickwad but what could possibly be so bad that we would never see him again?” Nicole asked in a low voice. She looked at the trunk of weapons she’d retrieved from the basement of Shorty’s. “Do we have any silver bullets?”

“Look in the lower part,” Wynonna said. She checked her guns, making sure they were all loaded and ready to go, before answering Nicole’s original question. “Knowing old-school Doc, he probably killed her husband and ran. Maybe even outed her as a werewolf on his way out of town just for shits and giggles.”

Nicole found some silver bullets and handed part of the stash to Wynonna. Nicole loaded up one of her spare guns and handed it to Waverly, who put it in her holster, not bothering to look up from the documents in front of her.

Jeremy let his search programs comb through the data, looking for old records of farm buildings and destroyed foundations new building projects uncovered. His program uncovered several sites, all too old to have any ownership records attached and all long abandoned and unoccupied. Any of them could be where Harriet is holding Doc, if she’s holding him at all. He motioned Waverly over and they looked through the sites together to narrow it down. Wynonna and Nicole continued getting ready, talking over attack strategies and swapping misinformation about werewolves.

“Okay, okay. That’s ridiculous. Werewolves don’t eat human flesh. That’s just a myth,” Jeremy interjected.

“What like werewolves are supposed to be?” Wynonna said.

“They’re much more likely to eat a rabbit or a deer while in wolf form.”

Several hours later when the heat of the day had settled comfortably into the open bar, they found the house. It was several miles away from main street, far even from the sprawl of the town. After centuries of neglect, the house was luck to be standing. In the most recent photos Jeremy had, the roof was rusted and torn apart and the entire structure was titling towards the nearby forest. If this had been Harriet’s home, she hadn’t been there for a long, long time.

“Found it!” Waverly shouted. “It’s Harriet’s house. Doc should be there.”

“He better be,” Wynonna said.

In less than a minute, they were all in Wynonna’s truck, headed to the farm house. Jeremy and Nicole rode in the truck bed, which made him almost glad that he hadn’t eaten in hours. The ride was bumpy and Wynonna drove faster than Jeremy was comfortable with but he wasn’t going to complain. Wynonna would bit his head off if he made them wait another second to find Doc.

Nicole looked at him and smiled. “First time in the back of a truck?” She yelled over the wind.

“That obvious?” Nicole laughed at his jumpiness. He held onto the edge of the truck for dear life, while she casually stretched out, checking her guns for the ten thousandth time today. She readjusted her bulletproof vest. He wondered why she hadn’t given him one and desperately hoped that meant he could stay in the truck for the confrontation part of this mission.

“Here,” she tossed him a spare vest. “A stab vest might be better against a werewolf but it’s better than nothing.”

He fumbled with the straps and gulped as the decaying farm house came into view. When she handed him a handgun, he knew he was done for.

“I never passed my firearms test and am I terrible in high stress situations!”

“Tough shit. Point and shoot, Jeremy, and try not to hit any of us.”

The truck stopped fifty feet away from the front door. Wynonna got out, gun drawn and pointed straight at the house. The rest of them followed behind her, Jeremy at the back, as they approached the house.

“Werewolf bitch, get the fuck out here or we blow up your fucking house.” Wynonna yelled. Leaning towards Jeremy she whispered, “Feel anything yet, Mr. Tingles?”

“Not a thing, Ms. Shotgun.”

“Never call me that,” she whispered back before turning towards the house once again. “I’ll give you ten more seconds and then we’re coming in. One – Two – Three …”

She signaled to Nicole who ran quietly up to the door, gun pointed into the house’s dark interior. Waverly ran up a few seconds later, standing on the other side of the door, and by the time Wynonna got to ten, the Nicole kicked in the door and the couple ran inside. When Wynonna and Jeremy caught up to them, they found another note laying on the floor of the living room. The house was quiet, and empty. Neither Doc nor Harriet were there, not anymore at least.

“God dammit! If I don’t get to shoot something soon, I’m gonna explode.” Wynonna yelled, storming off deeper into the house. She slammed open doors, pointing her gun at nothing but the musty air. “Fuck!”

Once Waverly was finished reading the note, she passed it to Jeremy. It was even vaguer than the first, and even less useful.

> _Where good and evil don’t exist, you’ll find an end to all of this._
> 
> _In a sea of greens, John Henry screams, begging me to take my wish._

“Since when does Doc write poetry?” Jeremy asked.

“I don’t think Doc wrote it,” Waverly said. “I think Harriet is trying to tell us something. I think she wants us to find her.”

“Okay, but what does it mean?” Nicole asked. “‘Where good and evil don’t exist,’ that could be anywhere in Purgatory.”

“What if…” Jeremy started. “What if she wasn’t going to the house when Doc saw her. What if she was running to the forest? She was turning into a wolf, if she came to the house she would’ve wrecked this place, but if she went to the forest…”

“Sea of greens. Like a forest.” Nicole said.

“I’ll go get Wynonna,” Waverly said. “I guess we’re going hiking.”

The forest is terrible. There are too many bugs. Every stick Jeremy steps on makes his heart race. The trees seem to be closing around them, forcing them to go deeper into the forest and trapping them in the process. Birds squawk directly above their heads. Their calls sound more human than Jeremy is comfortable with and he can almost make out words. The path Wynonna is leading them down is lined with bright orange and yellow flowers, so neatly arranged that they had to be planted by someone. Maybe Harriet had been living out here all this time, Jeremy thought. The BBD handbook never mentioned that werewolves had longer life spans but this is Purgatory. Nothing is as it should be here. Not even the supernatural.

Jeremy’s legs were starting to get sore and his shirt was soaked in sweat when they finally saw something other than trees, a small cave with a faint glow of fire sat just a few feet off the path. Wynonna pulled her gun and started shouting.

“Harriet! Doc better be in there because if I walked through this shitty forest for nothing, I’m gonna skin your hairy ass.”

A figure emerged from the cave. She had a smile on her face and, except for the blood on her hands, she looked remarkably normal. Nicole drew her gun and joined Wynonna at the front. Harriet kept walking towards the pair, completely ignoring the guns pointed at her by two very pissed off women.

“These are silver bullets and I’ve got more than enough to put you down,” Wynonna yelled.

Harriet laughed. “You humans love to threaten us. But you do a shit job at the follow through. If you’re a friend of John Henry’s, you know that better than most. John, get out here before your friends do something very stupid.”

Doc walked out of the cave, clenching his side and leaning more on his left leg than usual. His tank top was stained with streaks of blood and dirt. Jeremy thought he looked tired, but better than her expected a man kidnapped by a werewolf to look. Doc leaned on the opening of the cave for support and waved to the group.

“That fucking bastard,” Wynonna said under her breath. She waved back, smiling like she was seconds away from murdering him.

Harriet turned back towards the cave and waved them towards it. “Come on in. We can have a nice chat and you all can check yourselves for ticks. God knows you’re covered in ‘em.”

The cave was nicer than a cave in the middle of the forest should’ve been. An old oil lamp was set up, staving away the growing dusk of a day wasted. Harriet helped Doc lower himself onto one of the two logs set up in front of the cooking fire and then took the other. The rest of them sat on the floor, moving around the fire as the wind shifted the direction of the smoke. A pan with some meat Jeremy couldn’t identify sat on top of the fire. Squirrel, Harriet told him when she saw him staring at it intently. She offered them some homemade booze. They all refused, which she shrugged off and took a swig directly from the bottle.

“Well I guess I have some explaining to do,” Doc started, the crackling of the fire echoing in the small space of the cave. When no one interrupted, he continued. “As you have probably learned from the lifted journal in Waverly’s collection, Harriet was a… friend of mine from many years ago. I hurt her in a way I am deeply sorry for.”

“There’s no need to play coy, John. Tell your friends what you really did.” She looked in Doc’s direction, but he did not meet her eyes. “No? Okay, I’ll do it for you. John Henry made me human. He took away the one thing that drew him to me in the first place.”

“But how…” Jeremy wondered.

“Any thing is possible in a town full of witches,” Harriet mused. “But he went to one of the overachievers. Not only did they turn me human, but made me immortal by linking my life to the life of the man who wanted me cursed in the first place. John left town once the deed was done and when he returned, the Stone Witch threw him down a well I could not find. So, I hid out here. Haunting the farm house whenever a human came around trying to buy it.”

“Why did you stay here instead of the house?” Wynonna asked.

“That house had only ever known me as a werewolf.” She turned to look at Doc. This time he met her eyes, his face more pitiful than Jeremy had ever seen. “It didn’t feel right to return there as something else.”

Harriet went quiet for a while. No one dared break the silence. Wynonna poured herself a drink into a tin cup Harriet had set in front of them and scrunched up her face in disgust when she downed the full cup.

“The witch locked the wolf part of me in a silver necklace that they gave to John. All I wanted was that part of me back but he, he,” She erupted into laughter, hiccuping in the middle before calming herself. “He fucking broke it. Crushed it. He thought he was doing me a favor, isn’t that what you said John when I first brought you here? A fucking favor. As if being a human woman in the nineteenth century was better than being a werewolf. What a fucking fool.”

Doc muttered out an apology. He hadn’t known any better back then. Being a monster was a sin, a burden, a curse, not something any decent person would let another live with. So he smashed that part of her, not realizing she was cursed to live as long as him in a body that no longer felt like her own. He knew better now. He had met his fair share of monsters, fallen in and out of love with some, and grown to call them family. If he could turn back time, he never would have gone to that witch, he said.

Harriet let out a long sigh and slapped Doc’s back. “If I had met you again in the years after 1879, I would’ve killed you but I’m much less angry now than I was then. My apologies about roughing you up earlier but those wounds will heal. I’ve built a life here, on your time. All I ask is that you die a good death, many years from now. And oh, bring me some good booze every once in a while. This stuff is nasty.”

Nicole reached over to grab the bottle and took a whiff of it. “Methanol. You’ve been drinking poison.”

“Well then it’s a good thing I can’t die until he does.”

By the time the five of them get back to the truck, it was pitch dark out. Nicole and Waverly used flashlights to guide them back, while Jeremy and Wynonna dragged a tired and injured Doc behind them. The drive back to town was quiet. The radio played an old country song that fuzzed in and out as they drove along the road. Doc laid in the truck bed, his head in Jeremy’s lap and his eyes struggling to stay open. Jeremy absentmindedly ran his fingers through Doc’s hair. Doc was too tired to complain.

There were days in Purgatory where Jeremy could hardly believe he had lived anywhere else and days where part of him screamed to get in his Smart Car with his bags packed and never come back. He was afraid if he tried, he’d find out that he was trapped here, just like all the others were. Doc could leave but he would always be drawn back. Whether by someone he loved, someone he hurt, or someone who hurt him. He had too much history here to truly belong anywhere else. With time, Jeremy thought, the same might be true for himself. Everyone outside of the Triangle who knew him would forget him or would be made to forget. His family, what little was left, would stop telling stories of little Jeremy the scientist and they would slowly erase him, just like his mom. His friends would move on. His coworkers, well they were probably all dead.

Today was the former. As Jeremy helped Doc into his motel room and lay down on his couch, he couldn’t imagine doing anything other than this.

**Author's Note:**

> This is pretty ramble-y and went a bit off track but whatever. Let me know what you think. Thanks for reading!


End file.
